Staffer Who Released Iraq War Toll To Be Dismissed

March 08, 1992|By New York Times News Service.

WASHINGTON — The Census Bureau said Friday that it intends to dismiss an analyst who estimated that 13,000 Iraqi civilians were killed by U.S.-led forces during the Persian Gulf war, an estimate that was more than twice as high as the bureau`s subsequent official calculation.

A spokeswoman for the Census Bureau, Karen Wheeless, said that the decision stemmed not from the estimate itself but from the analyst`s decision to make the information public without submitting it to proper ``peer review`` procedures.

But the analyst, Beth Osborne Daponte, said Friday that she had obtained the proper reviews.

``The projections that I had prepared were approved by three levels of bureaucracy,`` including up to the assistant division chief of the bureau`s Center for International Research, where Daponte works, she said. ``The projections had the same scrutiny as any other figures that are prepared by the Census Bureau.``

Daponte said she released her estimates because the Census Bureau had no intention of making the information public.

Estimates of the number of Iraqi casualties caused by the war and its aftermath have been a sensitive issue for the Bush administration, which went to great lengths during the war to emphasize its focus on purely military targets.

Ever since Iraq capitulated, the Pentagon has said it is impossible to produce accurate estimates on the number of civilian deaths.

The new dispute, first reported Friday in The Washington Post, stems from an estimate that Daponte did on the post-war population of Iraq.

The center prepares an annual handbook on world population, which draws on information from a wide range of national and international sources.

Figures on the number of war-related deaths were prepared to update the population estimate.

After drawing on published information and on literature about estimating military casualties, Daponte calculated that 40,000 Iraqi soldiers and 13,000 civilians died in direct military conflict.

In addition, she estimated that 30,000 people had died during the Shiite and Kurdish rebellions after the war and that 70,000 people died from health problems caused by the destruction of water and power plants.

Since then, the bureau has released its own figures that lower the estimate on immediate civilian deaths from 13,000 to 5,000.